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Mozilla Thinks You Should Eat Cake

posted by CoolHand on Saturday August 22 2015, @05:47AM   
from the who-is-this-company-named-mozilla dept.

The Mighty Buzzard writes:

To the surprise of absolutely nobody who's been paying attention the past few years, Mozilla has announced that it will be deprecating all current extensions and have all future extensions be compatible with Chrome and Opera via the new WebExtensions API.

• We are implementing a new extension API, called WebExtensions—largely compatible with the model used by Chrome and Opera—to make it easier to develop extensions across multiple browsers.
• A safer, faster, multi-process version of Firefox is coming soon with Electrolysis; we need developers to ensure their Firefox add-ons will be compatible with it.
• To ensure third-party extensions provide customization without sacrificing security, performance or exposing users to malware, we will require all extensions to be validated and signed by Mozilla starting in Firefox 41, which will be released on September 22nd 2015.
• We have decided on an approximate timeline for the deprecation of XPCOM- and XUL-based add-ons.

Maybe now we can get a sustainable fork going?

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Original Submission

• Re:Isn't standardization a good thing? (Score: 5, Insightful) by Marand on Saturday August 22 2015, @07:22AM

  by Marand (1081) on Saturday August 22 2015, @07:22AM (#226179) Journal

  I understand that migrating extensions to a new API will be a lot of work for extension developers, but in the long run isn't it better to have a standard extension API instead of several browser-specific ones?

  It sounds great in theory, until you realise that all it takes to fragment things is someone (Google) going "Nope, fuck you and your 'standards', we decided to do it our own way" and refusing to play ball for a few years. Then you either have to give up what you already had or live with the fragmentation, especially if the uncooperative party gains any sort of market share. Which Google did, by leveraging Android and constant nagging to non-Chrome users in unrelated products like gmail and it search engine.[1]

  That's how we end up with things like systemd becoming ubiquitous, and why GNOME essentially creates all the "standards" for desktop environments. If someone else creates something, like improved notifications[2], GNOME refuses to use it, creates its own, and then other environments have to either support both types or give up and remove their own implementation, because GNOME will never use something it didn't create. See also pulseaudio, which was a latecomer but became the de facto standard due to stubbornness and politicking.

  Basically, the most stubborn party wins because everyone else eventually gets tired of fighting it, and everyone except the stubborn jackass loses.

  In this case, the problem is that it's Mozilla vs. Google. Mozilla was here first, it did these things before Chrome even existed, and if there was anything resembling a standard, Mozilla already had it (like with NPAPI). That doesn't matter, though, because Google doesn't care. They have a "my way or the highway" view of everything, so they reinvent the wheel (see also PPAPI) and then you have to either give up or deal with the fragmentation until you eventually get trampled or left behind. We've seen this play out with Google's stubborn strong-arm tactics regarding NPAPI vs. PPAPI support already, and the result is that on Linux, the most popular plugin (Flash) has PPAPI support but not NPAPI.

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  [1] Similar to how Microsoft gained its market share with IE.
  [2] This isn't a fictional example; the notification war thing happened with KDE4 and GNOME a few years ago and ended with KDE giving up and supporting both types due to GNOME suffering from NIH.

  Parent

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